fourwaystowalkadog

In the beginning God created jackal and fox, dingo and wolf.
Then man came along and created the bulldog, the golden retriever, the Lhasa
Apso, and the Dandie Dinmont terrier. No one can be sure exactly where one
creator left off and the other started, but a few scien­tists have guessed at
how it happened. One of the most compelling guesses comes from Konrad Lorenz, a
founder of ethology, the comparative study of animal behavior. In the
beautifully wrought first chapter of his book Man Meets Dog he imagined a
timid, bedraggled band of human be­ings—hunters and gatherers—struggling to
escape pred­ators on some fearsome prehistoric plain. The tribe has re­cently
moved into new territory, and the wild canines that usually follow it, hanging
back at night just beyond the campfire’s glow, don’t seem to have come along. As
a result, the people are suffering. Once contemptuous of the canines, they are
beginning to understand that the ani­mals, though annoying, served a useful
function at the campfire, warning with their ruckus when a saber-toothed tiger
approached in the night. Now that the people must stand guard for themselves,
they have not been getting much sleep. They walk wearily, seeking a safe place
to set up camp. Suddenly they stop: a welcome sound is in the air—one of those
lost canines is howling in the distance. The leader of the tribe—his forehead a
bit higher than the others’—takes a portion of their meager food supply and,
over the objections of his uncomprehending fellows, ex­ecutes what Lorenz
called a “stroke of genius,” one whose “meaning in world history is greater
than that of the fall of Troy or the discovery of gunpowder.” He faces the
source of the sound and throws a bone. Thus begins the domesti­cation of Canis
familiaris, the pet dog.

That people and dogs have got along so well since then is
largely attributable to the character of those wild ca­nines. To put it
bluntly, they must have been a lot like us. For one thing they probably lived
in well-organized social groups that were remarkably similar to those of the
human hunter-gatherers to whom they became attached. The wolf, which is
generally considered the dog’s wild ancestor (though scientists have quibbled
on this point; Lorenz, for example, had the jackal in mind when he wrote the
above scenario, though he later thought better of it), travels in a pack that
is roughly comparable to a slightly extended hu­man family: a mating pair, a
generation or two of their offspring, and a few related adults—aunts and
uncles, if you will. Mating pairs seem to stay together for life. The pack has
a pecking order, with an “alpha” male (not neces­sarily the mating male) at the
head. It hunts cooperative­ly—rare is the lone wolf that can bring down a
moose—and divides its labor to a small extent, as when a mother joins the hunt
and leaves another adult behind to care for her pups.

This social structure requires a good deal of communica­tion,
for each individual must know its place and its role in the society. Wolves
have elaborate means of expressing co­hesion and affection, and they maintain
their positions as leader and followers through ritualized gestures of domi­nance
and submission. Many wolf gestures are quite simi­lar to those used by people.
An alpha wolf returning to the pack after an absence is likely to be encircled
by several wolves and greeted with a great deal of affectionate nuz­zling, as a
daddy or mommy might be received at the end of a long business trip. A male
wolf asserting his domi­nance may behave like a lout picking a fight in a
saloon: he may scowl, pursing his lips and furrowing his brow, and stare
directly into his adversary’s eyes. In response the ad­versary might submit by
looking away, by “smiling” sheepishly—pulling back the corners of his closed
mouth—or by slinking away with his tail between his legs. Such sig­nals are not
universally understood among animals, not even among higher mammals. Konrad
Lorenz was con­vinced that dogs and cats have no inherent understanding of each
other’s body language, even though to human eyes their signals seem quite
similar. He also pointed out that one reason we consider bears so unpredictably
danger­ous—inclined to lash out with no apparent warning—is that the bear’s
face is thick-skinned and has little expres­sive musculature. Bears are not
able to communicate facially to the extent that dogs and people are.

In addition to using signals similar to ours, dogs may be
intelligent enough to learn some of our signals from us. One of the most
prominent and prolific writers on canines, Michael W. Fox, who is the director
of the Institute for the Study of Animal Problems, the scientific arm of the Hu­mane
Society of the United States, has observed that the canine “grin” often seen by
pet owners may be learned from human beings: this expression, in which the dog’s
lips are pulled up and back, exposing the teeth, is remark­ably similar to a
human grin, and in Fox’s experience dogs use it to communicate only with
people, never with one another. Another expert has suggested that an ability to
learn human facial expressions may account for the oft-re­peated observation
that pet dogs come to resemble their masters.

Though an experienced observer can tell a lot about a dog
simply by looking at it, the communication more com­monly goes from person to
dog. One reason for this, cer­tainly, is that our language makes us lazy,
insensitive to the nuances of posture and expression. Another reason may be
that the dog’s extraordinary sensory equipment enables it to pick up signals
that people don’t even know they’re sending. Dogs have been known to detect
sounds as high in pitch as 60,000 cycles per second (the human limit is about
20,000), and they are apparently able to make fine distinctions among human
words. Lorenz told of an animal psychologist named Sarris whose three German
shepherds could respond reliably to commands made by name from another room;
their names were Aris, Paris, and Harris. Of course the dog’s sensitivity to
sound is not nearly as im­pressive as its legendary sense of smell. A large dog’s
olfac­tory region—the nerve-packed membrane lining the nasal cavity, over which
inhaled air is drawn—is about fourteen times the size of the comparable
structure in a human be­ing. Investigators have found some dogs that are able
to detect sulfuric acid in concentrations of 1:10,000,000—less than a drop in a
hundred gallons. This acuity explains why dogs are so adept at finding lost
children, hidden ex­plosives, and smuggled drugs, and why pet dogs always seem
to be sniffing at each other or at the ground. Smell is to them what sight is
to us—their chief means of experi­encing the world. To say, as people sometimes
do, that “a dog can smell fear” may be more than merely a metaphor. Perhaps as
we learn more about the physiological causes of our mental states and the
chemical signals we give off—pheromones, as the biologists call them—we will
learn that dogs can smell a whole range of human emotions. That would come as
no surprise to legions of pet owners. One dog trainer I know claims that his
German shepherd can read his moods better than he can himself. “If I get out of
bed in a bad mood,” he said, “the dog knows it before I do, and I can see it in
the way he acts. He tells me.” The dog’s sensitivity to body signals, combined
with its inher­ent desire to follow a leader, probably explains the ability of
certain people miraculously to “train” a dog within a matter of minutes.
Evidently, in their posture, their move­ments, their tones of voice, and
perhaps even in their per­spiration, these people simply exude the aura of an
alpha wolf.

The canine, then, was highly qualified for the position of
man’s best friend. And its on-the-job training started as soon as it accepted
its first free meal; that’s when human beings began selecting, though
unconsciously at first, the characteristics they found most useful and
endearing. Chief among these is a kind of persistent infantilism, or a lack of
development of adult characteristics. Traits that change or fade as a wolf pup
grows to maturity persist through adulthood in domesticated dogs. In some
breeds of dog these include physical characteristics—shortened muzzle, floppy
ears, domed skull—but characteristics of behavior have doubtless been more
important. For exam­ple, wolf pups, like dog pups, are friendly to strangers
and highly dependent on their elders; these traits diminish as the wolf pup
grows into a wary, independent adult, but in the domestic dog they persist more
or less through life. We like our pets tractable and cuddly, and over thousands
of years we’ve selected the ones that remain that way. (Inci­dentally, this
phenomenon of persistent infantilism, some­times called neoteny or
paedomorphosis, is seen in other domesticated animals—for example, the domestic
pig and cow. Michael Fox has pointed out that it is also seen in hu­man beings:
in some respects we look and act a lot more like baby apes than like adult
apes.)

Of course, we haven’t quite succeeded in making our dogs as
tractable and cuddly as we might wish. In fact, as our society becomes
increasingly urban and our cities in­creasingly strange, our best friend
sometimes seems to be turning against us. Consider this classic pet-problem sce­nario:
A modern Mom and Dad, perhaps remembering the dogs of their own happy
childhoods, stop in at a shopping-mall puppy mart to pick up a surprise for the
kids. Believing that dogs are essentially alike, they intend to choose one of a
convenient size and an agreeable color. But their plans change as they are won
over by an adorable male puppy, one that pads up fearlessly to check them out
while his litter mates cower in the corner of their pen. Mom and Dad feel that
this dog has chosen them. So they bring him home, and the children give him a
name. Let’s call him Rambo.

All goes swimmingly for a few months, save for the usu­al
problems of soiled carpets and diminishing interest on the part of the kids.
Then one night, while the maturing puppy is eating his dinner, the youngest
child wanders into the kitchen and makes a move that looks to the dog, see­ing
it out of the corner of his eye, like an advance on his food dish. Responding
less to the child than to the genetic legacy of his hunter forebears, Rambo
growls his most menacing growl—as a feeding wolf might do in such a situ­ation,
even if the interloper were higher in the pack’s pecking order. The child recoils
in terror, and Rambo goes back to his dinner, having learned a new way to avoid
the stress of mealtime interruptions. The next time this se­quence occurs, the
child runs to the living room and com­plains to Mom and Dad. When Dad goes into
the kitchen to investigate, Rambo tries the technique out on him. Dad, knowing
little of dog behavior but feeling certain that retaliation would only make
things worse, also re­treats, giving Rambo another valuable lesson in how to in­fluence
people. Eventually, through numerous repetitions of this exercise, the dog
expands his territory until the en­tire kitchen is his at mealtime. And, having
had much suc­cess with the growling technique, he samples other tricks from his
bag of genetically organized aggressive behaviors, baring his teeth, snapping,
and—when those fail to pro­duce the desired result—biting. The children’s pet
has be­come a menace.

Perhaps TV can help. There’s Barbara Woodhouse, the Julia
Child of dog training, waving jauntily and striding confidently into the living
rooms of America,
dressed in her English-lady uniform of blue sweater, plaid skirt, and
no-nonsense shoes. Mrs. Woodhouse—it wouldn’t seem right to call her anything
else—is a savvy animal trainer, to be sure. Her experience is long and varied,
including work with horses and cows in addition to dogs. She has trained many
animals for the movies, and she wrote a couple of good books before becoming an
international media celeb­rity. And just look at the way the dogs mind her!
They seem to obey almost instinctively. That they return to their mischievous
ways as soon as she hands the leashes back to their owners only proves that she
is someone special.

With Rambo blockaded safely in the kitchen, Mom and Dad bask
in public television’s reassuring glow. This is go­ing to be easy. Mrs.
Woodhouse is full of advice, and Dad is taking notes: Hold the leash over two
fingers of the right hand. Not three fingers, two. Give the sit signal with two
distinct arm movements, and enunciate the command in separate syllables
accordingly: “Si-tt.” To praise the dog for doing well, scratch its chest
gently with one finger—don’t rub!—and say “What a good dog”; drop the pitch of
your voice on the word good. Remember, there are no bad dogs (except for the
obvious cases of mental derange­ment), only inexperienced owners. And we’re
going to fix that.

Next day Mom goes out and picks up the correct sort of choke
chain—the links are not too big, not too small—and when Dad gets home from work
he takes Rambo out for his first lesson, notes in hand. The notes say that a
good firm jerk on the leash can make a nervous dog confident, so Dad summons up
his merriest tone of voice, cries “Walkies”—the word Mrs. Woodhouse prefers to
“Heel”—and sets out with a decisive, confidence-building yank. Rambo
confidently bites him on the leg.

By this time Rambo is nearly a year old and has assumed in
our hypothetical household the same position that he enjoyed among his mates in
the pet shop: he is top dog, al­pha wolf, the leader of the pack. Unless they
are content to live with this situation—which a surprising number of people
seem to be—Mom and Dad now stand at a cross­roads. One way leads to the local
animal shelter. The other leads to a live, in-the-flesh dog trainer. We already
know what happens at the shelter. Let’s see what we can learn from a few
trainers.

TWENTY-NINE DOG OWNERS, twenty-nine dogs, and eight or ten
onlookers are gathered in the training area in front of Bill Koehler’s house in
On­tario, California.
It’s a Saturday morning, and Koehler’s son Dick is conducting the fifth session
of a ten-week be­ginners’ class in dog obedience. Bill Koehler (his last name
rhymes with dealer), who is seventy-one, began teaching such classes in 1946;
during the war he was a civilian train­er at the War Dog Reception and Training
Center, in San Carlos, California, and later he made a successful career in
what he calls the “picture-dog” business, training and han­dling such dogs as
Roy Rogers’s Bullet and the stars of the Walt Disney movies Big Red and The
Shaggy Dog. Now the family business consists mostly of group classes, and Dick
Koehler, who is fifty-two, runs nearly all of them—Friday nights at a dog club
in Fontana, Monday nights in the park­ing lot of a pet-supply house in Colton,
Tuesdays in San Bernardino, six and sometimes seven classes a week, thir­ty or
forty dogs to a class, 800 or 900 dogs a year.

Bill Koehler used to operate a kennel here in front of the
house. It’s in an out-of-the-way place in one of Ontario’s
industrial districts, so close to the tracks that some people have to struggle
to be heard over the sound of a long pass­ing freight. Not Dick Koehler; he has
voice to spare. He’s a rugged-looking man, with weathered skin, graying dark
hair, and a big belly hanging over his belt. With a leash in his hand he is
nimble. He sometimes paces while address­ing his students, and he sometimes
calls them “people,” as in “Now, people, there’s something I want to show you.
Who has a dog that’s heeling wide?”

To heel properly, a dog must walk at its handler’s left
side, changing pace as necessary to keep its ear about even with the handler’s
knee. A dog that heels wide is straying too far to the left, allowing too much
distance between it­self and the handler’s leg. If the dog is on a leash and
wan­ders to the far side of a fireplug, the fault can be annoying; if it
wanders to the far side of, say, a toddler or a senior citi­zen, the
consequences might be more serious. Dick Koehler is going to demonstrate a
cure.

A four-by-four wooden post is planted firmly in the yard,
extending three or four feet above the ground. It’s called the heeling post.
Koehler accepts a leash from one of his students and walks the volunteered dog,
a female black Labrador retriever, toward the post, allowing her to heel wide
so that she will pass by one side of the post while Koehler passes by the
other. As soon as he can see that the dog will err, Koehler locks the leash
tight in his hand and picks up his pace slightly; as he passes the post, the
dog is pulled rudely into it, her head pressed firmly against the wood. She
squirms and struggles, looking for a way out. Koehler keeps moving forward; the
pressure on the dog’s neck lets up only when she manages to free herself by
backing around the post.

Now Koehler returns to the starting point and sets off a
second time. Again he walks purposefully toward the post; again he gives the
Lab enough leash to hang herself. But this time the dog is having none of it.
As the two approach the post, she appears to have been grafted to Koehler’s
knee; she has no intention of letting anything come be­tween her and her
master. Koehler makes it hard for her, angling toward the post so that she will
have no room to pass with him. At the last minute she stops and lets him walk
ahead, and then follows him on the correct side of the post. Students and
onlookers laugh appreciatively.

The teacher addresses his class: “How many of you, when you
were little kids, stuck a hairpin in an electrical outlet?” Pacing, he surveys
the raised hands. “Couple of you. How many times did you do that?” Single
raised fin­gers. “One time. How many of you have ever held your finger over a
burning match? How many times did you do that?” Pause one beat. “It doesn’t
take long, does it? Okay, your dog is capable of figuring out a simple
mechanical problem—if you bang your head against a post, it smarts. It doesn’t
take much. The dumbest dog in the world is gonna bang his head against the post
maybe three times.

“Now, if you noticed, when I went past the post with the dog
the first time, I maybe even speeded up a little bit. I want to give that dog
the privilege of learning that when you bang your head against the post, it
smarts. That’s his God-given right, to learn information like that. Don’t take
it away from him. There are people in the world who would be kindly, and
actually end up punishing their dog, by coaxing and getting to the post and
losing their nerve and not allowing the dog to learn that when he sees that
post coming, he better duck behind the handler and get out of the way.” Pause.
“You understand that?”

Now the students line up to try it for themselves. Bill Koehler,
who is watching the lesson with me and wants to be sure I get the point, has
supplied me with a stopwatch and told me to record the total time each dog
spends in the trapped, hung-up position on the wrong side of the post. I’m also
to record the number of passes each dog makes before it catches on. Here are my
results from a sample of eighteen dogs: one dog failed to learn the lesson
after the third try; one learned in three tries; six learned in two; six
learned in one; and four could not be induced to run afoul of the post in the
first place. No dog spent more than eight seconds total in the hung-up position
on any one try, and most spent only three or four. Bill Koehler’s
interpretation of this data is that most dogs can figure out the relationship
among dog, handler, leash, and post within a few seconds, and many require only
one trial. It’s an example of what Koehler calls “single-experience learning,”
and he offers it as proof that dogs can think.

Koehler likes to show the heeling-post exercise to psy­chologists.
He sees them as the enemy, as inexperienced and overeducated fools who labor to
obscure the obvi­ous—that dogs and other animals are capable of reason—with the
gobbledygook of stimulus and response, operant conditioning, instinct and reflex.
“I always ask, when I give a clinic, if we have a psychologist or a psych major
present,” he told me. “You have to stake your shrink out, always.

“I had one psychologist cry,” he said proudly. This was at a
clinic in Elgin, Illinois.
Before demonstrating the heeling-post exercise he questioned her closely on
what the dog would do according to accepted psychological theory. “I made her
commit herself first. I pinned her down on every definition. You have to do
that with psychologists—they’re like weasels.” Then he walked a dog around the
post a couple of times and pressed the psychologist to ex­plain its behavior
without resorting to the concept of thought. “Tears were streaming down her
face,” Koehler said. Had he just confronted her with the bankruptcy of her
life’s work? Or had he reduced her to tears by the sheer force of his
badgering? Either is possible, I think. He’s an opinionated and combative old
cuss, but he makes a good case for himself.

BILL KOEHLER MAY BE THE ONLY person in the United
States whose name stands for a method, per­haps
even a philosophy, of dog training. The Koehler method, laid out in detail in a
successful series of books that began appearing in 1962, is known all over the
country—practiced in some places, vilified in others. Of course Koehler does
not mind the controversy; it is, he told me, a “marketable commodity.”

The Koehler method starts with a walk. The dog wears a
common choke-chain collar (universal choice of the train­ers I’ve met),
attached to a fifteen-foot cord that Koehler calls a “lunge” or “longe line.”
(One Koehler-method in­structor in my area calls it a “lounge line.”) The
handler may not tug on the line to indicate the direction he intends to go in;
rather, Koehler insists, the line must be slack, lest it become an unwanted
means of communication between handler and dog. Verbal communication is also
forbidden at this point. To those who cannot resist coaxing their dogs or
pleading with them, Koehler suggests tape over the mouth. The handler should
pay the dog no attention whatsoever. His task is simply to choose an objective
and walk toward it, holding the line firmly enough and pro­ceeding with enough
conviction to ensure that the dog has no choice but to come along. Whether the
dog “plows a furrow with his fanny or saunters at your side,” Koehler in­structs,
“do not permit him the victory of stopping you be­fore you reach your
objective.”

The purpose of this exercise, which takes up the first three
days of Koehler-method training, is to persuade the dog that the handler is
going to go where he pleases, and that if the dog wants to know where that
might be, it must watch the handler. Koehler contends that speaking and tugging
on the leash only convince the dog that it doesn’t need to pay attention. If
the handler announces his every move, the dog may feel free to pursue its own
interests be­tween announcements. Koehler says, “A dog is an intelli­gent
creature—intelligent enough to see that if the human is going to pay all the
attention, the dog doesn’t have to. There are lots of people who work as
seeing-eye humans for dogs that can see perfectly well. Seeing-eye humans do
all the thinking for them.”

These three days of noncommunicative walking are preparation
for what may be the most important event in the Koehler program. If all goes
well (Koehler promises it will), the fourth day brings a fundamental reordering
of the relationship between dog and handler. The handler begins by devising a
temptation that is certain to appeal to the dog and disrupt its
attentiveness—the neighbor’s cat, a pile of hamburger, an open gate. Say it’s
an open gate.

“Now, equipped with the longe,” Koehler has written, bring
the dog from confinement and approach the open gate as head-on as the layout of
your area permits. . . . If your dog fails to see the invitation, stop at least
twenty feet from the gate until he alerts to his opportunity. Lock both hands
tightly in the loop of the longe, and offer him Godspeed and the full fifteen
feet of slack. As he moves toward the gate, hold your line-grabbing hands to
your chest like a ball-hugging halfback and drive hard in the opposite
direction. You should be going at least eight miles per hour to ensure
follow-through for the dog’s abrupt stop and complete reversal. And there is a
rever­sal, unless you mush out and slow down. Let the unchal­lengeable force of
your momentum carry the dog at least eight feet in your direction so that the
lesson has the maximum significance as well as impact.

Can you picture this maneuver? What Koehler refers to as the
dog’s “abrupt stop and complete reversal” other peo­ple sometimes call flipping
or dumping the dog; of the eight feet that the dog is “carried in your
direction,” half or more are likely to be traversed in midair. It is a rude sur­prise,
which is exactly what Koehler intends. Just a few repetitions of this, he
claims—three minutes, more or less—will effect a dramatic transformation in the
dog’s be­havior. “The third time, you’ll feel like you lost a fish.” The dog
will be watching your every move; indeed, with its extraordinary sensory
abilities, it will seem to anticipate your every move. Koehler promises that by
repeating this exercise over a period of time with a wide variety of pro­gressively
more tempting distractions, one can eventually persuade the dog that when it is
in a training or obedience situation, it must watch the handler at all times,
especially when tempted by something else.

Some see this technique as cruel or unnecessarily rough.
Naturally Koehler’s perception is different, and he claims that the dog’s is
too. If one uses a fifteen-foot line, he says, and takes care to give the dog
plenty of slack, the dog per­ceives its “abrupt stop and complete reversal” not
as a fate visited upon it by the handler but as something it has brought upon
itself. Think of an oak tree, Koehler says. A dog may light out for the gate
once, or it may try running full-speed into an oak tree once. In each case it
quickly learns the consequences of its action. Now, Koehler asks, can you
imagine a dog running into the tree a second time? Does the dog hate the oak
tree? Is the oak tree cruel? If the dog does charge the tree again, does it
deserve to get a lump on its head? Koehler insists that the longe exercise is
every bit as impersonal. Moving eight miles an hour in one direction after the
dog has taken off in the opposite direc­tion is not a technique for punishing
or correcting the dog: at this early stage of training, Koehler says, he
wouldn’t think of correcting the dog. “But I’m gonna remember the cake in the
oven and I’m gonna run to see if it’s burning.” If the handler presents the
exercise without emotion or malice, the dog will perceive it that way, just as
it accepts the neutrality of the oak tree. That, Koehler says, is why the
technique is so much more successful than the com­mon method of yanking on the
leash and asking or ordering the dog to come along. The common method is a
contest of wills—master against dog. The Koehler method is a matter of fact—dog
against the oak tree, dog against the laws of physics. Were you to infer from
this that dogs have more respect for oak trees than they have for their
masters, Koehler would smile and say that you’re begin­ning to get the idea.

THE CONTEST OF WILLS does have a place in the Koehler
method. Indeed, it becomes central as training proceeds beyond the first,
fundamental steps. The special relationship between people and dogs is made
possible by a small miracle of transference: a dog is willing to accept a human
family as its pack, a human master as its alpha. But in the wolf pack the
master’s job is open to new applicants. Rudolf Schenkel, in a famous study on
wolf behavior, wrote that “every mature wolf has an ever ready ‘expansion
power,’ a tendency to widen, not a personal territory, but his own social
behavior freedom, and to repress his ‘Kumpans’ [the other members of his pack].”
The Koehler method assumes that the same is true of domestic dogs —that deep
within its canine heart every pet wonders if it might not be better suited for
the job of alpha than the chump who currently holds the posi­tion.
Occasionally—the Koehlers would say constantly—a pet dog will try its luck. It
may challenge the owner’s au­thority by simply disobeying, or in extreme cases
it may mount an actual physical attack.

The Koehlers and many other trainers therefore see their
work chiefly as a matter of establishing the proper dominance hierarchy—placing
the dog at the bottom of the household pecking order. The classic means of
assert­ing dominance is the simple “leash correction,” a decisive upward jerk
on the leash which momentarily closes the choke chain around the dog’s neck.
(If the chain is ar­ranged properly, it will fall open again immediately after
the pressure is released.) To this some trainers add a tech­nique or two
borrowed from the alpha wolf. Konrad Lor­enz claimed that he persuaded a
self-reliant chow to accept him as its master by leading the dog on long
excursions into unfamiliar territory, as the alpha wolf would lead his mates in
a hunt. The Monks of New Skete, a group of Eastern Orthodox religious who
breed, board, and train dogs in upstate New York (and who have published a
well-regarded book called How to Be Your Dog’s Best Friend), recommend
that pet owners assert dominance with a method they call the alpha-wolf
roll-over. The trainer grabs the dog by the scruff of the neck and rolls it
onto its back, into one of the classic postures by which an inferior wolf
submits to its betters. The monks also counsel pet owners on the use of eye
contact to communicate affection and disapproval.

Trainers say that such expressions of dominance are de­sirable
from the canine viewpoint as well as the human—that although dogs will test
their masters, or challenge them for the leadership position, all dogs are most
secure and confident when their places in the social order are firmly
established and enforced. According to this reason­ing, being the alpha wolf is
less important to a dog than having an alpha wolf and knowing with certainty
who it is. This may be why some dogs seem to go to pieces when separated from
their masters. It is also the rationale behind Barbara Woodhouse’s contention
that a skittish dog can be made happier and more confident by a few firm jerks
on its choke collar. “Jerk ’em and love ’em” is the way Mrs. Woodhouse puts it.

The Koehlers begin to rely heavily on the common leash
correction as they move into the standard beginning exercises—sit, lie down,
heel, stay, and so on. They also employ a couple of tricks picked up from the
behavior of nursing bitches. To say “No!” or “Knock it off,” the Koehlers use
the word out, which they claim mimics the guttural snarl used by a
mother to reprimand her young (for example, as Dick Koehler says, when a puppy
“bites too hard on the faucet”). To control an aggressive dog in extreme
circumstances—in other words, to stop a fighter or biter—they sometimes “hang”
the dog by its collar, lit­erally letting it twist in the wind. They say that
mother dogs discipline their puppies in a similar manner, taking them by the scruff of the neck and holding them, some­times
shaking them, in midair; Dick Koehler says the method is effective because dogs
fear the “loss of environ­mental control” that they suffer when their feet lose
con­tact with the ground. If hanging fails, the Koehlers some­times resort to
what they call the “tranquilizer”—a piece of rubber hose, reinforced with a
wooden dowel rod, that is used to strike the dog on the muzzle, between nose and
eyes.

Most conscientious trainers who use these techniques—and
many, perhaps a majority, do—try to be fair with them. Most would tell you that
though it is proper to cor­rect a dog for failing to obey, it is not proper to
correct it for failing to understand. If you want to teach your dog to sit, for
example, you must begin by gently guiding the dog into position while saying
the word sit, and you must con­tinue doing so until you are confident that the
dog understands what is expected of it; then and only then are you justified in
making a leash correction if the dog fails to sit on command. The Koehlers
subscribe to this standard. Bill Koehler’s books state it clearly, and Dick
Koehler em­phasizes it in his classes. Both also say that the most ex­treme
forms of discipline are appropriate only for the most extreme cases of
aggression—biting, fighting, and other pursuits that are likely to land a dog
in the local gas cham­ber. Here again, they subscribe to the common standard.
But the Koehlers have the reputation of being rougher than most trainers; in
some circles the mere mention of their name causes heads to shake and eyes to
roll.

One reason for this reputation is that what the Koehlers
consider the inevitable consequence of an errant dog’s mistake—the indignity a
dog is likely to suffer at the heel­ing post or on the end of a longe
line—looks to a lot of oth­er people like an unwarranted correction. Another
reason is the frankness with which Bill Koehler writes about the nuts and bolts
of dog discipline. Many trainers know how to use a rubber hose, and when it is
likely to be effective; not many feature such information in their books. But
the biggest reasons, I suspect, spring from Bill Koehler’s con­victions about
what dogs can do and what training should be. Koehler thinks that dogs are
smarter than most people will acknowledge. He also thinks that most training
prob­lems are matters of disobedience, not misunderstanding. The two
convictions are surely connected. Koehler thinks that if a dog fails to sit on
command after a few training ses­sions—and many do—it can only be because the
dog is getting uppity. Not only is it smart enough to understand what is
wanted, it is also smart enough to feel contempt, and crafty enough to express
it. Koehler has written:

Of the many ways in which a dog can demonstrate his
contempt for a deficient master, the “sit exercise” is one of the most
expressive. By simply waiting for the second, third, or fourth command, or a
number of nagging tugs before sitting, he can show his disdain. To add
emphasis, he can sit sideways, his eyes and mind focused on some­thing more
interesting than his master, who by now is happily misconstruing his action as
obedience.

Such response to a sit command is similar to the action
of a child who, when told to sit on a chair, flops down on the floor. To say
that the child’s response denoted re­spect and the exercise of good qualities
of character is ridiculous. To construe a dog’s delayed, inaccurate res­ponse
to command as character-forming obedience is laughable.

Koehler believes that the refusal to perform usually stems
from a lack of respect. He contends that dogs can be confused, upset, or
perhaps even angered by a tentative or unjust handler. What they respect, indeed
require, is au­thority, assurance, and fairness. This is another reason why
Bill Koehler forbids tugging on the leash and pleading with the dog for
cooperation. One decisive correction is far kinder, he says, than “nagging a
dog into neurosis.”

Another difference between the Koehlers and some oth­er
trainers is the degree to which they stress reliability and off-leash control.
The Koehlers are not content with a dog that will sit on command nine times out
of ten, or with a dog that obeys only when a leash keeps it close to its han­dler.
They strive, Bill Koehler says, for “the kind of obedi­ence that can save a
dog’s life,” a level of control that will stop a dog dead in its tracks when it
is about to do some­thing dangerous—take off after a moving car, for example,
or attack the toy poodle next door. For this reason among others, Bill Koehler
derides those who use food tidbits in training, the practitioners of so-called
positive or inducive methods; he calls them “cookie people,” making no effort
to hide the contempt in his voice. To train a dog solely by means of positive
reinforcement is to ask for trouble, he says, because the dog’s world is full
of positive reinforcers —toy poodles, moving cars, and hundreds of others. A
dog must learn to obey when no pleasure accrues from doing so; sometimes the
only motivation that will work is respect for (some would say fear of)
unpleasant consequences.

To ensure that this motivation will work even when the dog
is off the leash, the Koehlers use a couple of imple­ments designed to convince
the dog that the handler is ubiquitous or omnipotent—able to administer
corrections when he appears to be out of reach or even out of sight. One of
these implements is a “throw chain,” a short length of chain similar to that used
in choke collars, doubled over and fastened in a way that makes it a convenient
throwing object. After a dog has learned to perform the standard ex­ercises on
the leash, the Koehlers use the throw chain to wean it off the leash, directing
it at the dog’s backside if the dog fails to come immediately when called.
Later they add a “light line,” a length of fishing line that, Bill Koehler has
written, “should be very strong, very long, and very light: so strong that your
dog couldn’t possibly break it; so long that, regardless of [the dog’s] great
speed and your slowness, you would have no difficulty in grabbing the trailing
end [if the dog were to bolt]; and so light that its weight and length would be
almost imperceptible.” The idea is to persuade the dog that it can be reeled in
at any time; it can never be certain of being beyond the long reach of the
handler.

IF YOU CAN IMAGINE THESE TECHNIQUES beingpracticed on a
group of thirty more or less contentious dogs, by a group of thirty more or
less exasperated dog owners, in a public place like a park or a pet-shop
parking lot—flying chains and flipping dogs and jolting leash cor­rections and
people yelling “Ouut!” at the absolute top of their lungs, with now and then a
snarling dog suffering a loss of its environmental control—then you can imagine
the sort of public-relations problems Bill Koehler has en­countered in more
than forty years of dog training. He once showed me some faint scars in his
fingertips and told me this story about how he got them:

“I was in Griffith
Park, in Los
Angeles, and this person, who wasn’t even in our
class, brought a Dobie”—he means a Doberman pinscher. “Honest to God, it had
bitten seven people in a week, including a policeman. There was nothing wrong
with the dog, but the dog had controlled its owners, see, and had gotten
unstable, because he had no authority figure at all. So they handed me the
leash, and the dog tried to take me. I mean he was out to get me. So I took him
airborne. Well, the women—we were working on a basketball court there in Griffith
Park, and the women had all piled
their purses together, at one end of it. And I backed up holding the dog—did
you ever step on a pile of purses? Man, you go down! So I went down on the cement,
see. He was going after my face, but luckily I kept a hand on the collar, and
then somebody grabbed him—I couldn’t get up because there were purses all
around. There was a guy over on the tennis court, when I had the dog hung up, and
he said, ‘What are you tryin’ to do, kill that dog?’ A big old guy playing
tennis. And what I said to him I wouldn’t repeat even to another man. I think
one of the things I said was, ‘Come on over—you handle him.’ This always shuts
them off. But it just bugs you when you’re trying to do something for people,
with an animal, and one of these wincers doesn’t understand.”

By the time Koehler began writing books, his contempt for
the wincers—or the “humaniacs,” as he sometimes calls them—was so finely developed
that he decided to take the offensive. When I read his first book, I thought I
was reading the second or third, so combative was its tone; I assumed that I’d
lost track of a book somewhere and that Koehler was answering its critics. In
the first chapter he goes after psychologists, tidbit trainers, the authors of
oth­er dog-training books, and—most vehemently—the “kindly” people:

They range over most of the civilized world; generally
one or more will be found close to where dogs are being worked. They often
operate individually, but inflict their greatest cruelties when amalgamated
into societies. They easily recognize each other by their smiles, which are as
dried syrup on yesterday’s pancakes. Their most noticeable habits are wincing
when dogs are effectually corrected and smiling approvingly at each other when
a dozen ineffective corrections seem only to fire a dog’s maniacal attempts to
hurl his anatomy within reach of an­other dog that could maim him in one brief
skirmish. Their common calls are: “I couldn’t-do-that—I couldn’t­-do-that,” and
“Oh myyy—oh myyy. “ They have no mat­ing call. This is easily understood.

When I asked Koehler what he was so angry about, he assured
me that he was not answering any critics when he wrote that passage. It was a
preemptive strike. “See,” he told me, “I think most people are sane, and I
wanted a way that I could alienate all the nuts and get the mentally sound
people to read my book.” On another occasion he made me laugh out loud by
announcing, “I guess the nicest thing that could happen to you is to enjoy the
enmity of the incompetent.” This is another reason Bill Koehler has a bad
reputation in some dog-lovers’ circles: he baits his adversaries. He takes an
almost perverse pleasure in shocking them.

He can’t help himself. “See, I love dogs. Believe me, I’ve
slobbered over more good and worthless dogs than al­most anybody. Yesterday
morning I was bawling like a baby because I had to have an old dog put down.
But you know, sentiment is one thing, but there’s a time for logic, too, in the
training of dogs and every other profession. I suppose that every doctor who’s
had to open the abdomen of a child felt some sorrow for that child, but he also
felt a responsibility to take whatever drastic steps were neces­sary to try to
save the child’s life.

“I’ve run a survey, from Cape Town,
South Africa, to Regina,
Saskatchewan, and in this survey I ask the
people who are attending my clinics a simple question: If they were a social
menace, and if they had their choice, would they rather be put to sleep in a
black box or be knocked cold? And from Cape Town
all the way to Regina, I’ve never
run into anyone who would rather be put to sleep permanently than knocked
unconscious, if it took that.

“I think these humaniacs are the worst damned enemies that
dogs and other people have. . . . A lot of this stuff sounds so nice—‘We love
our doggies.’ Cripe. They don’t really love ’em, they love themselves, and they
love their image of being such kind people. And I’ll tell you this, when their
dog gets killed unnecessarily from running out in traffic, they’re very apt to
go the whole route and put a little box edged in black in Off-Lead
magazine or one of those: Terdle, 1979-1982.’ And the poor dog would be alive
today if they had vertebras instead of Jell-O.”